You Can’t Run Forever is a film brimming with potential, but unfortunately, it falls short of its promising opening act. J.K Simmons delivers a compelling and unsettling performance, but the film fails on all fronts, leaving you wanting far more.
Miranda (Isabelle Anaya), a young woman already suffering from acute anxiety due to a past tragedy, faces a new terror when a serial killer (J.K. Simmons) chooses her as his latest target. In a harrowing hunt through the woods, Miranda finds strength she never knew she had as she tries to elude her murderous tracker.
If You Can’t Run Forever could have kept up with its impactful opening and kept our killer’s motives to himself as we watched him manoeuvre from one murder to the next, catching victims here and there as we live with the monsters, then this would have been quite the frightening viewing experience. Alas, the film opts for a far more conventional run-of-the-mill cat-and-mouse thriller that falls flat.
You could almost make a checklist of how, by the books, the film becomes. A protagonist who has had a previous traumatic experience? Check. Killer stalking his prey in the woods with a bumbling police department unable to stop him, and so they get slain with ease? Check. A few jumpscares that neither make you jump or scare you? Check. It’s just so samey that you can’t help but be disappointed.
This is a shame as there is an awful lot of potential here in If You Can’t Run Forever, be it J.K. Simmons’s cold and unsettling performance as the killer Wade, who genuinely perturbs. You want to get as far from him as you possibly can, and that is before he even begins his sociopathic trail of destruction. You sense he is also having a ball of a time, and as You Can’t Run Forever goes on, you begin to realise the character is in the wrong movie. This man should be in a film that is difficult to watch, one where he revels in the mayhem, a horror character to truly remember. Alas, he is stuck in a thriller that barely lifts the heart rate.
To their credit, co-writers Michelle Schumacher and Carolyn Carpenter try to make Wade as morally grotesque a person as they can, with some of his actions and Simmons as the lead, but it should work like gangbusters. Yet, for some reason, it doesn’t fully hit the mark once we break into the second and third acts of the film. It is almost as if they changed the entire story to something more comfortable to stomach because there is a nasty film hiding in You Can’t Run Forever; it’s just too afraid to poke its head out from the bushes to be what it should be its best self.
The worst sin that You Can’t Run Forever does? It gives Wade a backstory when he does not need one. The scariest human monsters are always the ones who carry out their carnage for no rhyme or reason. Halloween worked so well because we did not know why young Michael or adult Michael became a killer. Here, we get the worst excuse ever, and you can probably guess why an older man would suddenly become a mass murderer.
You Can’t Run Forever could have been so much more, but something went wrong here in the script stage, and without Simmons as our villain, it would have been even worse such a disappointment.
★★ 1/2
You Can’t Run Forever is out In Theatres, On Digital and On Demand now
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